Written in Black, page 10
Had a poo,
In the loo,
And said ooh ooh!
Sure enough, Michael was back to normal in no time at all, and he even thanked me later by letting me flip through his dirty magazine stash, some copies of which still lay hidden behind jackets of academic texts buried beneath a pile of little-used books in a forgotten corner of his room, out of the reach of our father.
Perhaps he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Even if his negatives – the stealing, the lying, the vandalism, the suspensions, the fights, the smoking, the drinking, the under-age driving – did overwhelmingly outnumber his positives. Mum’s departure from our home had hastened Michael’s as well, but the same was probably true the other way around; my brother’s delinquency had left Mum increasingly distraught, and had only caused my parents to argue more than usual.
It had been so obvious that as the situation got worse with Michael, Mum grew ever so much weaker and wearier, looking like her very life-force was being sapped away by some evil spirit that had latched itself to her. And yet, till the end, until she had left, he had remained her favourite among the four of us. And evidently he still was, judging by how he was getting to speak to her on a regular basis while the rest of us had to wait in the dark, praying for a call that might never come. It would’ve been an excellent point to put to my mother, but her absence had lasted so long that just getting to talk to her was the only thing on my mind; all other issues could wait in line. Besides, it wasn’t anything I wasn’t already familiar with; I had long been used to watching others getting favoured treatment over me.
The phone read 12.00. It had been over half an hour since I’d escaped from that truck, and I was nowhere close to getting on a definite course to Badir.
Turning my eyes back to the road, I found, to my dismay, that my current path had doubled back to a junction I had already walked past only a short while ago, thus cancelling out a good five minutes’ worth of walking time. Even more frustratingly, the junction had three different roads to follow, and I couldn’t tell the errant path from the others, leaving open the possibility of me walking around in circles for who knows how long.
With nothing else to do but press on, I went with my instincts and chose the path whose houses looked most unfamiliar to me. After a little more walking, I came across a large rusted-over rubbish dumpster to my left that I’d not encountered before, and I took this as a sign that I was headed in the right direction and was finally on my way out of there. The dumpster sat by the roadside, in front of a plot of land that might have been in development at some point in the past, but was now teeming with grass and undergrowth and small trees. The front of my shirt immediately went over my nose as I walked by the dumpster, and it stayed there long after the smell of garbage had faded behind me. Houses populated the opposite side of the road, and they looked a lot fancier compared to the ones closer to the wilderness that I’d left behind. These houses weren’t just bigger and better but even had fences around them, chain ones at first, and then as I walked on, concrete walls.
But not everything was a pleasant distraction in this neighbourhood, as I soon found out. When I turned the next corner, not too far from the dumpster, I came face to face with a roving pack of feral dogs, which in turn looked straight back at me with a very unhealthy amount of interest. There were three of them, all a mottled mix of black and dark-brown, with docked tails and collarless necks. And they were all huge; the smallest of them on its hind legs would’ve stood taller than me.
As I took a few slow steps back, they took a few steps forwards, their mouths drooling thick, foamy saliva, and eyes gleaming with raw hunger. Fighting the urge to break into a full-blown run, I tried to maintain a composed retreat, but the hounds persisted, coming towards me with their jaws wide open, showing off jagged canines that glinted like daggers in the sunlight.
Growing increasingly desperate to shake them off, I took a gamble and started backing away a bit faster. This seemed to work at first, and the distance between me and the pack widened. Hoping they were on the verge of giving up the chase, I turned away from them, but then saw two more strays slink in my way, even nastier-looking than the three behind me. A quick dart backwards revealed that those mutts were still on my tail, creeping steadily forwards, their shoulders and knees wound back with starved eagerness. One of them, a dog with half-torn ears and one bulging red eye, let out a long and sinister snarl, and it turned my blood to ice.
The next few moments whizzed by in a flash, and I suddenly found myself squatting on top of the dumpster, trying to keep away from five sets of snapping jaws and praying that they wouldn’t be able to jump too high. They were definitely trying hard enough, and a couple of them had almost managed to put their front limbs onto the lid of the dumpster already.
“Help! Somebody help!” I shouted as loudly as I could, jumping away from an attacking dog, the one-eyed one that was determined to make me lunch. I was overcome with an urge to kick at its snout in retaliation, but I stopped myself in time, knowing that to do so would only bring me closer to getting my foot chomped off.
A paw lashed at my side, and I retreated with a whimper, momentary terror setting in. This was met with a series of barks that came at me loud and fiery like gunshots, causing me to recoil further back in instinctive fear. It was remarkable how friendly a couple of them still managed to look, their tongues wagging out of their grinning faces, as if eager to be petted. But not the one-eyed one. No, he was after my blood. He was hopping mad that his prey has escaped his clutches, and he growled murderously and snapped his jaws at me, hoping to set them on my juicy flesh.
Space was limited on top of the dumpster, and keeping still was an impossibility, let alone sitting down and huddling. I had to constantly veer away from the attacks coming in from all sides, doing what I could to avoid getting parts of me torn away and chewed off. My clothes were on the receiving end of a different kind of soaking as I twisted and turned from one angle to another, panic-stricken. I swore to myself that I was never going to get a dog as long as I lived.
Soon, two of the dogs dropped down on all fours, frustrated and seemingly tired, and then, shortly after, two more decided to get some rest. This left behind One-eye as my main opponent. A few rivulets of courage returned when I saw that he was the only one propped up against the dumpster now, and I took my sandals off and clapped them together as near his snout as I dared.
“Go away! Shoo!”
This only made him madder though. He started to snarl viciously, and, with a cry of outrage, made an impressive jump with his forelegs that almost worked in getting him on top of the dumpster with me. The move took me by surprise, and I stumbled and nearly toppled over, prompting two of his friends to run to the other side, where I was about to fall. While I tried to regain my footing, I accidentally dropped one of my sandals to the ground. One-eye wasn’t the least bit distracted by it; his eyes didn’t leave my face. Angered by the loss of one of my weapons, I waved the remaining one at him even more vigorously.
“Go away! Get out of here!” I cried. One-eye tried to go for my hand rather than surrender.
“Get out! Or I’ll …” My arm drew back; One-eye didn’t back down.
“Take that, you son of a bitch!” I hurled the sandal as hard as I could. It missed him completely and hurtled along the road, skipped a few times, then ended up in the grass, inches from the drain. One of the other dogs ran after it, but One-eye wasn’t fooled by such tricks. He stepped in closer and engaged me in a face-off, a staring contest that he looked very prepared to fight till the end, even to the point when I’d be a skeleton atop a rubbish container, and he a skeleton in front of it.
This must have been one of the smartest dogs to have ever lived, right up there with Laika and Anubis, a canine criminal mastermind who’d probably put the average Bruneian gangster to shame with his sheer, single-minded viciousness. It was a good thing that he was only interested in messing up rubbish dumps and snacking on little children, or else we’d all be doomed, for he might have just taken over the world.
I paced around a bit on top of the dumpster, the unprotected soles of my feet collecting rust grit, grime and even more unspeakable scraps and specks of crud. The surface was rather hot; though not quite yet scalding, it was uncomfortable enough to stop me from sitting or standing in one place for long. Yet, I was glad that the lid had been closed when I got to it, the alternative I couldn’t bear even picturing.
Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to wait as long as becoming a skeleton for help to arrive, for only about ten minutes after I had thrown the sandal, my saviours turned up. Unfortunately for me though, they were the most unlikely bunch of saviours I’d have expected, and only a little better than the savage, bloodthirsty hounds at my feet.
Chapter Ten
They came in a white stationwagon that had too many dents and scratches to count and a windscreen displaying what was possibly the world’s largest collection of squashed insects and dried bird droppings. Neither the dogs nor I took much notice of the vehicle when it first popped into view a few houses up, motor puttering away and heading down the road in our direction. It was impossible to disregard, however, when it didn’t slow down; in fact, it was accelerating steadily, threatening to crash head-on into the dumpster. But at the last moment, it swerved out of the way with a sharp screech of its tyres, barely missing a collision with the pack of mongrels, which were sent scattering about in five different directions.
Instinctively, I flung myself down onto the dumpster’s lid and landed on all fours, scraping my shins and bruising my legs. Nevertheless, in the heat of the moment, I felt nothing but unabashed worship for the crazy idiots in the car who’d saved my life, and who’d only just managed to steer the vehicle into the opposite lane, the one the stationwagon should have been using all along, and bring it to a stop.
A group of young men stepped out, one of them with a clean-shaven head, two of them sporting baseball caps, three of them with their hair painted at least two colours, four of them wearing leather jackets over their t-shirts, and all five of them puffing on cigarettes and laughing maniacally amongst themselves. None of them had yet noticed me lying there sprawled on the dumpster.
“Whoahhh … didya see dat?” giggled the guy with the shaved head, exposing a large gap in between his front two teeth, into which he had stuffed a cigarette. The gap in Ah Peh’s teeth was miniscule compared to this guy’s.
“Dude!” shrilled his blond companion, slapping the car door repeatedly with his right hand. “Whooooo! That was awesome, man!”
Could it really be? Were these guys the fabled poklans I’d heard my classmates talking about? Brunei’s very own brand of punks, famous for their love for cigarettes, fast-food burgers, whooping and the creative arts (especially when performed on the walls of public buildings). I had never seen a poklan before, but I’d heard a lot about them at school, especially from the teachers, who regarded them as no-good, troublemaking rascals. They were all the rage amongst some of my peers though, who claimed that they were down with these rascals, and who dreamed of living the poklan-life of roving around town on lowrider-style cars and blaring out the latest, most slammin’ beats while competing with each other to see who could whoop the loudest and the longest. Brunei may have been renowned for its pirates in the past, but here in the present, we had to make do with our poklans. My curiosity aroused, I got to my feet and eagerly waited to be acknowledged by them while they giggled and aimlessly walked around their car. I wondered if this was the beginning of a special poklan dance.
“Hey! Hey, guys!” I shouted. “Over here!”
At long last, they noticed me.
“Whoahh! Look!” the one with the shaved head sniggered, pointing at me. “What the hell, man?”
I decided to call this one Baldie, obviously only to myself. He had a flame tattoo on the back of his neck, but “Baldie” fit him better than “Mr. Tattoo”.
“Makin kool jua, rumahnya tong sampah!” one of the other poklans collapsed onto his knees in amused laughter, the black cap on his head bobbing up and down with him.
The dogs were long gone, so I jumped down to the road. Standing at ground-level, I was surprised to find that the poklans were a lot shorter than they’d seemed at first, and not a great deal taller than me.
“Thanks for saving me! Those dogs were about to kill me, you know,” I said, walking towards them.
“Kuyuk?” Black Cap expressed his disbelief through his glee. “Mananya kuyuk?”
“Hey, bro … Where’re your shoes, man?” asked another poklan; he was wearing a thick gold chain around his neck.
“Uh, I threw them at the dogs …” I pointed to one of my sandals lying by the dumpster. “I really need to get to Badir now. Do you know how to get there? Any chance you could take me?”
This was received with more laughter.
“Hey … Hey, bro …” Baldie lurched over, holding his palm out. “Wazzup, man!”
Ah, the universal low-five. This was a promising start. It showed they’d accepted me as one of their own. I extended my hand to touch his.
“Haw haw! Too slow, bro!” But Baldie retracted his hand before I could make contact, and left me swiping at the empty air between us. The rest of the gang hooted even louder as he walked up to my side and wrapped an arm around my shoulder.
“Look, please …” I tried to shake him off, but Baldie held on to me tightly.
“Bro, we’ll take you out, okay? Heehee … We’ll take you someplace fun.”
“Uh, no, I need to get to Badir, please …”
“Dudes! Let’s ride!” he yelled, and the other four took this as the signal to frogmarch me to their car.
“Where are we going? Hey, stop it!” I protested, but the gang only doubled up in laughter.
“My sandals!” I cried, pointing desperately to the dumpster, but the poklans didn’t seem to hear nor care. I was shoved into the backseat of their stationwagon, and then three of them climbed in beside me, trapping me there. The other two got in the front, and we promptly raced off at a speed that I wouldn’t have imagined possible for a vehicle this worn out. The sudden force pinned me to the seat, and then a great swerve to the left sent me face-first into the car’s door panel, crushing me between its sour, melted-plastic-smelling synthetic padding and Black Cap’s right butt cheek.
“Ow! Hey! Be careful!” I screamed. Horrifyingly, my lips had landed inches from a brown smudge that I initially feared to be much, much worse but thankfully turned out to be a mixture of stale anchovy paste and rotting onion fragments.
The car continued to swerve this way and that, and back and forth I went with it, falling against then away from the door’s mouldy lining. Elbowing back against Black Cap didn’t seem to have any effect on him, but I kept trying anyway. Despite my awkward position, I managed to crane and twist about my neck enough to get myself views of the rest of the car: there were tattered rubber mats on the floor, caked in mud; there were hairs all over them and some other unidentifiable stuff that would have looked at home on a kitty litter tray; there were more brownish stains lining the entire interior of the car, going up almost to its ceiling, along with the odd black scorch marks of cigarettes here and there. And then there was the spacious trunk at the back, of course, bare except for a metal basin and a few black satchels. Now why couldn’t they have shoved me in there instead of into the backseat with these three idiots?
“Hey, man! Stop knockin’ around! And don’t mess wit’ the cap, yo!” yelled Black Cap from beside me, finally noticing my repeated elbows into his side. He took off his cap then smoothed over his flattened hair.
“Yeah, dude! Nanti potong kau punya puchong, ha!” threatened one of the other poklans.
“Eh, dudes, bising, eh!” Baldie turned and shouted, ordering us all to pipe down, his eyes very much directed away from the road ahead although he was driving.
“Hey! Where are you taking me? Hey, tell me now!” I yelled at Baldie. The blond guy in the seat next to him switched on the music, drowning me out.
Oooh, bay-beh, bay-beh, you’re so freak-ay!
“This is kidnap! You’d better let me go if you’re not taking me to Badir!” I tried to scream over the blaring speakers.
Bitches keep tellin’ that I come so eaz-ay!
“Do you hear me? Hello!”
Bros from da hood, we like it real sleaz-ay!
“Hey! I’m talking to you!”
Bros like me sho’ know we like p … The car hit a speed bump, and the track was replaced by a series of continuous clicks that sounded a lot better than the song that had been playing. The blond guy banged on the sound system with his fist, but the CD refused to stop clicking. He pushed the eject button in response, and the result was the same.
“Shit, man! It’s stuck!”
“Get it out, dude!” snapped Baldie
“I can’t, man!”
“Hell wit’ dis, I’ll sing. Bros like me …” Baldie began, and the others joined in loudly.
I covered my ears and lowered myself to the filth-encrusted floor of the car, pulling my body out of the back-seat squeeze and my head out of the way of Black Cap’s ass. I’d ended up being where shit was actually all around me rather than being next to where shit came from, but at least here, I could just about tuck myself into a little ball and wait out this ordeal. If I survived.
The stationwagon continued to swerve and shimmy violently, knocking us around like clothes in a tumble dryer. Each time we went flying to one side, the poklans stopped their singing to burst into spontaneous, unbridled guffawing, which only served to alarm me more. During the odd occasion when Baldie drove the car in a straight line, his friends compensated for the lack of movement by rocking together synchronously as they chanted. My car sickness began to surface once more, so I shut my eyes tight and forced all my attention on my eyelids and my hands over my ears.
“You guys are crazy!” I screamed. “Slow down! Slow down! There’re other cars on the road!” For the next ten minutes, I remained where I was, while barking out pleas for them to show a bit of sanity. But nothing I said or did seemed to get through to them.
In the loo,
And said ooh ooh!
Sure enough, Michael was back to normal in no time at all, and he even thanked me later by letting me flip through his dirty magazine stash, some copies of which still lay hidden behind jackets of academic texts buried beneath a pile of little-used books in a forgotten corner of his room, out of the reach of our father.
Perhaps he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Even if his negatives – the stealing, the lying, the vandalism, the suspensions, the fights, the smoking, the drinking, the under-age driving – did overwhelmingly outnumber his positives. Mum’s departure from our home had hastened Michael’s as well, but the same was probably true the other way around; my brother’s delinquency had left Mum increasingly distraught, and had only caused my parents to argue more than usual.
It had been so obvious that as the situation got worse with Michael, Mum grew ever so much weaker and wearier, looking like her very life-force was being sapped away by some evil spirit that had latched itself to her. And yet, till the end, until she had left, he had remained her favourite among the four of us. And evidently he still was, judging by how he was getting to speak to her on a regular basis while the rest of us had to wait in the dark, praying for a call that might never come. It would’ve been an excellent point to put to my mother, but her absence had lasted so long that just getting to talk to her was the only thing on my mind; all other issues could wait in line. Besides, it wasn’t anything I wasn’t already familiar with; I had long been used to watching others getting favoured treatment over me.
The phone read 12.00. It had been over half an hour since I’d escaped from that truck, and I was nowhere close to getting on a definite course to Badir.
Turning my eyes back to the road, I found, to my dismay, that my current path had doubled back to a junction I had already walked past only a short while ago, thus cancelling out a good five minutes’ worth of walking time. Even more frustratingly, the junction had three different roads to follow, and I couldn’t tell the errant path from the others, leaving open the possibility of me walking around in circles for who knows how long.
With nothing else to do but press on, I went with my instincts and chose the path whose houses looked most unfamiliar to me. After a little more walking, I came across a large rusted-over rubbish dumpster to my left that I’d not encountered before, and I took this as a sign that I was headed in the right direction and was finally on my way out of there. The dumpster sat by the roadside, in front of a plot of land that might have been in development at some point in the past, but was now teeming with grass and undergrowth and small trees. The front of my shirt immediately went over my nose as I walked by the dumpster, and it stayed there long after the smell of garbage had faded behind me. Houses populated the opposite side of the road, and they looked a lot fancier compared to the ones closer to the wilderness that I’d left behind. These houses weren’t just bigger and better but even had fences around them, chain ones at first, and then as I walked on, concrete walls.
But not everything was a pleasant distraction in this neighbourhood, as I soon found out. When I turned the next corner, not too far from the dumpster, I came face to face with a roving pack of feral dogs, which in turn looked straight back at me with a very unhealthy amount of interest. There were three of them, all a mottled mix of black and dark-brown, with docked tails and collarless necks. And they were all huge; the smallest of them on its hind legs would’ve stood taller than me.
As I took a few slow steps back, they took a few steps forwards, their mouths drooling thick, foamy saliva, and eyes gleaming with raw hunger. Fighting the urge to break into a full-blown run, I tried to maintain a composed retreat, but the hounds persisted, coming towards me with their jaws wide open, showing off jagged canines that glinted like daggers in the sunlight.
Growing increasingly desperate to shake them off, I took a gamble and started backing away a bit faster. This seemed to work at first, and the distance between me and the pack widened. Hoping they were on the verge of giving up the chase, I turned away from them, but then saw two more strays slink in my way, even nastier-looking than the three behind me. A quick dart backwards revealed that those mutts were still on my tail, creeping steadily forwards, their shoulders and knees wound back with starved eagerness. One of them, a dog with half-torn ears and one bulging red eye, let out a long and sinister snarl, and it turned my blood to ice.
The next few moments whizzed by in a flash, and I suddenly found myself squatting on top of the dumpster, trying to keep away from five sets of snapping jaws and praying that they wouldn’t be able to jump too high. They were definitely trying hard enough, and a couple of them had almost managed to put their front limbs onto the lid of the dumpster already.
“Help! Somebody help!” I shouted as loudly as I could, jumping away from an attacking dog, the one-eyed one that was determined to make me lunch. I was overcome with an urge to kick at its snout in retaliation, but I stopped myself in time, knowing that to do so would only bring me closer to getting my foot chomped off.
A paw lashed at my side, and I retreated with a whimper, momentary terror setting in. This was met with a series of barks that came at me loud and fiery like gunshots, causing me to recoil further back in instinctive fear. It was remarkable how friendly a couple of them still managed to look, their tongues wagging out of their grinning faces, as if eager to be petted. But not the one-eyed one. No, he was after my blood. He was hopping mad that his prey has escaped his clutches, and he growled murderously and snapped his jaws at me, hoping to set them on my juicy flesh.
Space was limited on top of the dumpster, and keeping still was an impossibility, let alone sitting down and huddling. I had to constantly veer away from the attacks coming in from all sides, doing what I could to avoid getting parts of me torn away and chewed off. My clothes were on the receiving end of a different kind of soaking as I twisted and turned from one angle to another, panic-stricken. I swore to myself that I was never going to get a dog as long as I lived.
Soon, two of the dogs dropped down on all fours, frustrated and seemingly tired, and then, shortly after, two more decided to get some rest. This left behind One-eye as my main opponent. A few rivulets of courage returned when I saw that he was the only one propped up against the dumpster now, and I took my sandals off and clapped them together as near his snout as I dared.
“Go away! Shoo!”
This only made him madder though. He started to snarl viciously, and, with a cry of outrage, made an impressive jump with his forelegs that almost worked in getting him on top of the dumpster with me. The move took me by surprise, and I stumbled and nearly toppled over, prompting two of his friends to run to the other side, where I was about to fall. While I tried to regain my footing, I accidentally dropped one of my sandals to the ground. One-eye wasn’t the least bit distracted by it; his eyes didn’t leave my face. Angered by the loss of one of my weapons, I waved the remaining one at him even more vigorously.
“Go away! Get out of here!” I cried. One-eye tried to go for my hand rather than surrender.
“Get out! Or I’ll …” My arm drew back; One-eye didn’t back down.
“Take that, you son of a bitch!” I hurled the sandal as hard as I could. It missed him completely and hurtled along the road, skipped a few times, then ended up in the grass, inches from the drain. One of the other dogs ran after it, but One-eye wasn’t fooled by such tricks. He stepped in closer and engaged me in a face-off, a staring contest that he looked very prepared to fight till the end, even to the point when I’d be a skeleton atop a rubbish container, and he a skeleton in front of it.
This must have been one of the smartest dogs to have ever lived, right up there with Laika and Anubis, a canine criminal mastermind who’d probably put the average Bruneian gangster to shame with his sheer, single-minded viciousness. It was a good thing that he was only interested in messing up rubbish dumps and snacking on little children, or else we’d all be doomed, for he might have just taken over the world.
I paced around a bit on top of the dumpster, the unprotected soles of my feet collecting rust grit, grime and even more unspeakable scraps and specks of crud. The surface was rather hot; though not quite yet scalding, it was uncomfortable enough to stop me from sitting or standing in one place for long. Yet, I was glad that the lid had been closed when I got to it, the alternative I couldn’t bear even picturing.
Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to wait as long as becoming a skeleton for help to arrive, for only about ten minutes after I had thrown the sandal, my saviours turned up. Unfortunately for me though, they were the most unlikely bunch of saviours I’d have expected, and only a little better than the savage, bloodthirsty hounds at my feet.
Chapter Ten
They came in a white stationwagon that had too many dents and scratches to count and a windscreen displaying what was possibly the world’s largest collection of squashed insects and dried bird droppings. Neither the dogs nor I took much notice of the vehicle when it first popped into view a few houses up, motor puttering away and heading down the road in our direction. It was impossible to disregard, however, when it didn’t slow down; in fact, it was accelerating steadily, threatening to crash head-on into the dumpster. But at the last moment, it swerved out of the way with a sharp screech of its tyres, barely missing a collision with the pack of mongrels, which were sent scattering about in five different directions.
Instinctively, I flung myself down onto the dumpster’s lid and landed on all fours, scraping my shins and bruising my legs. Nevertheless, in the heat of the moment, I felt nothing but unabashed worship for the crazy idiots in the car who’d saved my life, and who’d only just managed to steer the vehicle into the opposite lane, the one the stationwagon should have been using all along, and bring it to a stop.
A group of young men stepped out, one of them with a clean-shaven head, two of them sporting baseball caps, three of them with their hair painted at least two colours, four of them wearing leather jackets over their t-shirts, and all five of them puffing on cigarettes and laughing maniacally amongst themselves. None of them had yet noticed me lying there sprawled on the dumpster.
“Whoahhh … didya see dat?” giggled the guy with the shaved head, exposing a large gap in between his front two teeth, into which he had stuffed a cigarette. The gap in Ah Peh’s teeth was miniscule compared to this guy’s.
“Dude!” shrilled his blond companion, slapping the car door repeatedly with his right hand. “Whooooo! That was awesome, man!”
Could it really be? Were these guys the fabled poklans I’d heard my classmates talking about? Brunei’s very own brand of punks, famous for their love for cigarettes, fast-food burgers, whooping and the creative arts (especially when performed on the walls of public buildings). I had never seen a poklan before, but I’d heard a lot about them at school, especially from the teachers, who regarded them as no-good, troublemaking rascals. They were all the rage amongst some of my peers though, who claimed that they were down with these rascals, and who dreamed of living the poklan-life of roving around town on lowrider-style cars and blaring out the latest, most slammin’ beats while competing with each other to see who could whoop the loudest and the longest. Brunei may have been renowned for its pirates in the past, but here in the present, we had to make do with our poklans. My curiosity aroused, I got to my feet and eagerly waited to be acknowledged by them while they giggled and aimlessly walked around their car. I wondered if this was the beginning of a special poklan dance.
“Hey! Hey, guys!” I shouted. “Over here!”
At long last, they noticed me.
“Whoahh! Look!” the one with the shaved head sniggered, pointing at me. “What the hell, man?”
I decided to call this one Baldie, obviously only to myself. He had a flame tattoo on the back of his neck, but “Baldie” fit him better than “Mr. Tattoo”.
“Makin kool jua, rumahnya tong sampah!” one of the other poklans collapsed onto his knees in amused laughter, the black cap on his head bobbing up and down with him.
The dogs were long gone, so I jumped down to the road. Standing at ground-level, I was surprised to find that the poklans were a lot shorter than they’d seemed at first, and not a great deal taller than me.
“Thanks for saving me! Those dogs were about to kill me, you know,” I said, walking towards them.
“Kuyuk?” Black Cap expressed his disbelief through his glee. “Mananya kuyuk?”
“Hey, bro … Where’re your shoes, man?” asked another poklan; he was wearing a thick gold chain around his neck.
“Uh, I threw them at the dogs …” I pointed to one of my sandals lying by the dumpster. “I really need to get to Badir now. Do you know how to get there? Any chance you could take me?”
This was received with more laughter.
“Hey … Hey, bro …” Baldie lurched over, holding his palm out. “Wazzup, man!”
Ah, the universal low-five. This was a promising start. It showed they’d accepted me as one of their own. I extended my hand to touch his.
“Haw haw! Too slow, bro!” But Baldie retracted his hand before I could make contact, and left me swiping at the empty air between us. The rest of the gang hooted even louder as he walked up to my side and wrapped an arm around my shoulder.
“Look, please …” I tried to shake him off, but Baldie held on to me tightly.
“Bro, we’ll take you out, okay? Heehee … We’ll take you someplace fun.”
“Uh, no, I need to get to Badir, please …”
“Dudes! Let’s ride!” he yelled, and the other four took this as the signal to frogmarch me to their car.
“Where are we going? Hey, stop it!” I protested, but the gang only doubled up in laughter.
“My sandals!” I cried, pointing desperately to the dumpster, but the poklans didn’t seem to hear nor care. I was shoved into the backseat of their stationwagon, and then three of them climbed in beside me, trapping me there. The other two got in the front, and we promptly raced off at a speed that I wouldn’t have imagined possible for a vehicle this worn out. The sudden force pinned me to the seat, and then a great swerve to the left sent me face-first into the car’s door panel, crushing me between its sour, melted-plastic-smelling synthetic padding and Black Cap’s right butt cheek.
“Ow! Hey! Be careful!” I screamed. Horrifyingly, my lips had landed inches from a brown smudge that I initially feared to be much, much worse but thankfully turned out to be a mixture of stale anchovy paste and rotting onion fragments.
The car continued to swerve this way and that, and back and forth I went with it, falling against then away from the door’s mouldy lining. Elbowing back against Black Cap didn’t seem to have any effect on him, but I kept trying anyway. Despite my awkward position, I managed to crane and twist about my neck enough to get myself views of the rest of the car: there were tattered rubber mats on the floor, caked in mud; there were hairs all over them and some other unidentifiable stuff that would have looked at home on a kitty litter tray; there were more brownish stains lining the entire interior of the car, going up almost to its ceiling, along with the odd black scorch marks of cigarettes here and there. And then there was the spacious trunk at the back, of course, bare except for a metal basin and a few black satchels. Now why couldn’t they have shoved me in there instead of into the backseat with these three idiots?
“Hey, man! Stop knockin’ around! And don’t mess wit’ the cap, yo!” yelled Black Cap from beside me, finally noticing my repeated elbows into his side. He took off his cap then smoothed over his flattened hair.
“Yeah, dude! Nanti potong kau punya puchong, ha!” threatened one of the other poklans.
“Eh, dudes, bising, eh!” Baldie turned and shouted, ordering us all to pipe down, his eyes very much directed away from the road ahead although he was driving.
“Hey! Where are you taking me? Hey, tell me now!” I yelled at Baldie. The blond guy in the seat next to him switched on the music, drowning me out.
Oooh, bay-beh, bay-beh, you’re so freak-ay!
“This is kidnap! You’d better let me go if you’re not taking me to Badir!” I tried to scream over the blaring speakers.
Bitches keep tellin’ that I come so eaz-ay!
“Do you hear me? Hello!”
Bros from da hood, we like it real sleaz-ay!
“Hey! I’m talking to you!”
Bros like me sho’ know we like p … The car hit a speed bump, and the track was replaced by a series of continuous clicks that sounded a lot better than the song that had been playing. The blond guy banged on the sound system with his fist, but the CD refused to stop clicking. He pushed the eject button in response, and the result was the same.
“Shit, man! It’s stuck!”
“Get it out, dude!” snapped Baldie
“I can’t, man!”
“Hell wit’ dis, I’ll sing. Bros like me …” Baldie began, and the others joined in loudly.
I covered my ears and lowered myself to the filth-encrusted floor of the car, pulling my body out of the back-seat squeeze and my head out of the way of Black Cap’s ass. I’d ended up being where shit was actually all around me rather than being next to where shit came from, but at least here, I could just about tuck myself into a little ball and wait out this ordeal. If I survived.
The stationwagon continued to swerve and shimmy violently, knocking us around like clothes in a tumble dryer. Each time we went flying to one side, the poklans stopped their singing to burst into spontaneous, unbridled guffawing, which only served to alarm me more. During the odd occasion when Baldie drove the car in a straight line, his friends compensated for the lack of movement by rocking together synchronously as they chanted. My car sickness began to surface once more, so I shut my eyes tight and forced all my attention on my eyelids and my hands over my ears.
“You guys are crazy!” I screamed. “Slow down! Slow down! There’re other cars on the road!” For the next ten minutes, I remained where I was, while barking out pleas for them to show a bit of sanity. But nothing I said or did seemed to get through to them.
